Contrariamente a quello che potresti aver sentito, l’Europa è una storia di successo del 21 ° secolo – Monocle

>Innovation? Please. We are not [trying to be Silicon Valley](https://monocle.com/affairs/urbanism/punggol-digital-district-singapore-silicon-valley/) – and that is exactly the point. While others chase the latest app or cryptocurrency bubble, European companies are solving real problems. 

Pretending that Silicon Valley is about ‘chasing cryptocurrency bubble’ shows that author is Baghdad Bob level delusional. I am writing this on US-designed laptop with US-designed CPU and originally Finnish, but now mostly US-designed OS (I think Linus Torvalds moving to US and getting American citizenship is a perfect metaphor of the whole European tech industry). EU public services and companies are almost completely dependent on US-based cloud services. We have no CPU manufacturing beyond decades old technology useful only for automotive and EU cloud services are losing market share instead of increasing it despite all the squawking about ‘digital sovereignty’.

Even the sole shining jewel that gets brought up every single time, ASML, is dependent on US patents.

Europe slept through chip revolution, through early internet revolution, through cloud revolution and now it is getting ready for another nice nap while AI revolution is unfolding.

Sure, you can pretend that EU can be a comfortable, quiet retirement home forever, but how exactly it is going to be funded when ever increasing amount of money will be flowing to US-based companies and next US president will be able to extort EU however he pleases by simply threatening to shut down our economy and public services?

Yay positive news 🙂

>Innovation? Please. We are not trying to be Silicon Valley – and that is exactly the point. While others chase the latest app or cryptocurrency bubble, European companies are solving real problems. BioNTech helped to save the world during the coronavirus pandemic. Novo Nordisk is tackling diabetes and obesity. ASML builds the machines that make computer chips possible. Airbus keeps people flying. Our renewable-energy sector is reshaping how the world powers itself. This is not flashy disruption – it is the kind of deep, patient innovation that moves civilisation forward.

To be honest, Europe is not a single country is very much at play here, some countries have been doing worse due to reliance on older decaying industries, while others are still prospering and growing.

Overall though the situation is not amazing, we suffer from lack of investments, much smaller financial markets that simply makes innovation easier to finance in the USA (when you have 60ish trillion available in the market versus less than 1 such as in most EU exchanges and the difference is even more staggering if you consider venture capital.) Being export oriented also makes us vulnerable and we have significant weaknessess on the front of Energy, defense (although we are exporter of military hardware, we do have some significant supply limitation) and a massive dependency on the IT sector which are all going to be serious issues that individually we likely don’t have the resources to tackle.

Is Europe doomed today? Possibly not, we still have some strong industries, but in most of the larger eu nations the trends are not positive, growth has been stagnant and nothing is done to reverse the course. We are not defeated yet, but we can’t bury our head in the sand and say that everything is fine.

Nearly two deades of mismanagement after the 2008 crisis has severely damaged our economies, we need to set a new course, but we are more divided than ever and nationalist anti-eu parties are ascending which complicate things.

Europe is one of the last bastions where a more socialist oriented capitalism exists and to be honest I like it there, I would love for us not to be forced to abandon that model due to lack of a long term vision and nationalist bullshit dividing us.

I mean, everyone thats not completely sucked in by propaganda realises this

I’m 99% sure this article was written by ChatGPT. Even if you ignore the ” – ” dashes everywhere. 

“This transformation represents a fundamental shift in…” is such a typical AI sentence structure.

Also:
“These are not small things – they are the stuff that determines…”
Next paragraph:
“This is not flashy disruption – it is the kind of deep, patient innovation that moves civilisation forward.”

Don’t we still have 75 years to go?

I am glad to see more voices that don’t use the US and China benchmarks as measures of success, but I am worried when I see European governments left & right cutting welfare more and more – *this* is what will make us more like the US and China.